The Olive
Schreiner Letters
Project

The
Olive Schreiner Letters Project
To
quote from this page, please reference it as 'Olive Schreiner Letters
Project - Home Page' www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/index.html and
the paragraph number.

1.1The
Olive Schreiner Letters Project is funded by the ESRC. It will
transcribe,
analyse and publish the complete extant Olive Schreiner letters
presently in
archival locations world-wide. Through this, it will also contribute
theoretically and methodologically to
the use of letters and other epistolary
materials in social science and humanities research.

1.2The
feminist and socialist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner
(1855-1920)
was one of the most important – and radical
social
commentators
of her day. Her published writings
include
novels (The
Story
of An African Farm, Undine, From Man to
Man), allegories (Dreams,
Dream Life
and Real Life, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland),
social theory (The Political
Situation, Closer Union, Woman and
Labour).

1.3Around 4800
Schreiner letters
are extant, with
most never having been
previously published or discussed. They are an unparalleled source for
exploring the unfolding thinking of one of the great feminist theorists
and key
New Woman writers. They are also a rich resource around which to
formulate
methodological and theoretical means of analysing a large-scale
epistolary
dataset.

1.4Schreiner’s
developing analysis and social theorising in her letters includes such
topics as colonialism
under transition, metropolitan
feminism and socialism, prostitution and its analysis, changing
understandings
of ‘race’ and capital, imperialism 'on the ground'
in
southern Africa, the
South African War and its concentration camps and women’s
relief
organisations,
international perspectives on women's franchise campaigns, labour
issues,
international feminist networks, pacifism and war economies, and
political and
economic changes in South Africa post WW1.

This website is no longer updated
as the OSLP project ran from 2008 to 2012.

All extant Olive Schreiner letters, team
publications and other materials will be found at:

February
2014: Whites Writing Whiteness project update. The Whites
Writing Whiteness website has received a spring-clean, a new blog post
on 'Thinking with Norbert Elias, about race…' is available, and
the site now hosts a brand new feature - a Cabinet of Curiosities!
Read on...

January
2014: Vote for the best Olive Schreiner letter! closing date 31 March
2014The prize is an Unwin edition of Schreiner's Dreams, first published in 1890. We
(Liz Stanley & Andrea Salter) as the editors of the Schreiner
letters have identified a 'top ten' to choose from. The nominated
letters, with live links to them, are available here. We hope you enjoy
reading them!
July 2013:
Liz Stanley's Imperialism, Labour and
the New Woman: Olive Schreiner's Social Theory (Durham, UK:
sociologypress, 2002) is now available as a PDF download here. It includes an extensive new Preface
which reflects on the main themes of the book from the perspective of
2013 following work on the Olive Schreiner Letters Project. June 2013: We are
very pleased to announce that a new edited collection, onDocuments of Life
Revisited, has been published, with several
chapters
drawing on work by the Schreiner Letters Project and the Olive Schreiner Letters Online.

Taking off from Ken Plummer’s work in the original Documents of Life, the contents
explore a range of different kinds of life documents and delineate a
critical humanist methodology for researching and writing about these -
letters, memoirs, ethnographic fieldnotes, photographs, interviews and
online sources all feature. Edited by Liz Stanley, University of
Edinburgh, there are 14 chapters which provide research-based
discussions of exciting new ways of thinking about and analysing
documents of life. A flyer including a Table of Contents and 20%
off the book’s price is available here,
while the
Ashgate website also features a price reduction for web orders.‘Documents
of life have been acknowledged as
major research resources for a century and more. But they do not always
receive the critical attention they deserve. As Liz Stanley and her
authors demonstrate here, we need to revisit the humanist tradition
that treats lives, narratives and biographies as prime topics of
analysis and as sources of insight in the social sciences.’
Paul Atkinson, Cardiff University, UK

‘“Truth
is beauty”, Ken Plummer writes in his contribution to this
critical volume of essays that
respond to his pathbreaking work Documents of Life. This is indeed a
beautiful book, wherein truth
unfolds through different stories, artfully brought together by Liz
Stanley. A book about the
thick autonomy and the unbearable lightness of stories entangled in the
web of human
relations.’
Maria Tamboukou, University of East London, UK
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Futher information about Liz
Stanley's three-year ESRC Professorial
Research Fellowship, which is concerned with researching‘Whites
Writing Whiteness:
Letters, Domestic Figurations and Representations of Whiteness in South
Africa 1770s-1970s’, is available at:

Fully searchable
transcriptions of Schreiner's c4800 extant letters plus an editorial
apparatus around these are now accessible via www.oliveschreiner.org

March
2013 UPDATEWebsite
Usage
Statistics Available!Would you like to know how the Olive Schreiner
Letters Project website and the Olive
Schreiner Letters Online website have been used since they were
launched? Google Analytics Data Reports are now available via the links
below:- OSLP
website report(Dec 2008 –
Mar 2013)- OSLO
website report (Jan 2012 – Mar
2013)
June
2012
UPDATE
Two features of the Olive Schreiner
Letters Online are now available - find
out more here!

April
2012
UPDATE
Would
you like to know more about
Olive Schreiner Letters Online?
A slide show
about producing the website & ideas for
potential research using the letters can now be accessed here.

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Would you like to hear more about
'lives and events' from across the globe? Please subscribe to
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& Letters
mailing list** by emailing oliveschreiner@yahoo.co.uk.
Alternatively, you can self-subscribe to the mailing list by sending a
blank email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
with
the following in the subject: sub lives-and-letters

A Budget of Schreiner Letters from July
1913
During July 1913, Olive Schreiner wrote nine letters, published as part
of the Olive Schreiner Letters Online (www.oliveschreiner.org). They
are important letters, some of them especially so. Although written
over a short period of time, and two of them the same day, they are all
tailored for their particular addressee and feel and read differently.
Please click the link above to access.

We have
posted a set of letters around the publication of
Schreiner’s influential Woman
and Labour (1911) to commemorate its Centenary. Woman and
Labour
was described by Vera Brittain as the ‘bible of the women’s
movement’ and it remained a key feminist text through to the
1960s. In it, Schreiner’s analysis of value and social labour
anticipated recent feminist rethinking, with her letters providing
remarkable insight into the completion, publication and reception of
the book. There are many more such comments in the complete letters,
which can be accessed when the Olive
Schreiner Letters Online goes live
in January 2012.

15/02/11post –Helen
Dampier & Liz Stanley have been invited to participate in
the international workshop on ‘Gender Histories Across Epistemologies’
organised by Mary Jo Maynes and Donna Gabaccia at the University of
Minnesota,
Minneapolis, in mid April. Their paper is entitled ‘I just
express my
views & leave them to work’: Using Olive Schreiner’s
letters to re-think
the historiography of Cape politics 1899-1910’. A draft
version
will be posted
on the OSLP website with comment invited, nearer the date of the
Workshop.

08/09/10post
–The
Letters of Alice Greene, teacher, critic of the South
African War, & letter-writer extraordinary (1858-1920) Two books
of interest to historians and sociologists (ed. John Barham)